4.2 Creating a Table

Creating the database is the easy part, but at this point it is
empty, as SHOW TABLES tells you:

mysql> SHOW TABLES;
Empty set (0.00 sec)

The harder part is deciding what the structure of your database
should be: what tables you need and what columns should be in
each of them.

You want a table that contains a record for each of your pets.
This can be called the pet table, and it
should contain, as a bare minimum, each animal's name. Because
the name by itself is not very interesting, the table should
contain other information. For example, if more than one person
in your family keeps pets, you might want to list each animal's
owner. You might also want to record some basic descriptive
information such as species and sex.

How about age? That might be of interest, but it is not a good
thing to store in a database. Age changes as time passes, which
means you'd have to update your records often. Instead, it is
better to store a fixed value such as date of birth. Then,
whenever you need age, you can calculate it as the difference
between the current date and the birth date. MySQL provides
functions for doing date arithmetic, so this is not difficult.
Storing birth date rather than age has other advantages, too:

You can use the database for tasks such as generating
reminders for upcoming pet birthdays. (If you think this
type of query is somewhat silly, note that it is the same
question you might ask in the context of a business database
to identify clients to whom you need to send out birthday
greetings in the current week or month, for that
computer-assisted personal touch.)

You can calculate age in relation to dates other than the
current date. For example, if you store death date in the
database, you can easily calculate how old a pet was when it
died.

You can probably think of other types of information that would
be useful in the pet table, but the ones
identified so far are sufficient: name, owner, species, sex,
birth, and death.

VARCHAR is a good choice for the
name, owner, and
species columns because the column values
vary in length. The lengths in those column definitions need not
all be the same, and need not be 20. You can
normally pick any length from 1 to
65535, whatever seems most reasonable to you.
If you make a poor choice and it turns out later that you need a
longer field, MySQL provides an ALTER
TABLE statement.

Several types of values can be chosen to represent sex in animal
records, such as 'm' and
'f', or perhaps 'male' and
'female'. It is simplest to use the single
characters 'm' and 'f'.

The use of the DATE data type for
the birth and death
columns is a fairly obvious choice.

Once you have created a table, SHOW
TABLES should produce some output: